Abby Says Goodbye to Her Box

I’ve lived in this box for twenty-four years.

It’s constricting and small and suffocating.  It’s also safe.  

It’s hard to know if someone else put me here or if I put me here.  These walls that contain the “quiet girl,” the “shy girl,” the “Harry Potter girl, the “weird girl.”  Did I put myself in the weird box?  Or did I just become resigned to the label.  I took the walls they put around me and I reinforced them.  I covered them with posters and t-shirts that would scream loud enough so that I didn’t have to.  So I could stay quiet and weird and shut out the world beyond them.

Whether it was them or me who put me here, I have stayed in the box.  I stayed because I thought if I was those things – if I was weird and nerdy and quiet, maybe that meant I was boring and unworthy of anyone else’s attention.  Maybe all I ever could be were the words they used to define me.  So I took the words and I owned them.

But you can’t own something that’s not yours.  You can’t live in a box made of words that don’t define you.  It can’t hold you.  Fat, nerd, quiet, killjoy, straight.  They’re labels that don’t quite fit.  They don’t quite cover who I am.  I’ve peeked outside the box recently and it’s brighter out there.  It’s open.  There’s nothing pinning me down outside the box.

But still.  Leaving the box is hard.

I love this place.  I’ve been here forever.  Not all the time in the box has been bad.  Those words that bind the bricks of this box might not wholly make up the mess that is me, but they’ve been parts of me.  I’ve worn these words on my person long enough they’ve started to tattoo themselves into my skin.  Sometimes they are a mark of beauty, a reminder of the past.  Other times they are scars – failures and reminders of the time I spent lying to myself.  I love and hate these marks the way I love and hate my box.  The way I love and hate myself.

But the hate is starting to fade now.  I know this because at least now I know there is a box.  Before it was just my place in life.  It was the place I thought I had to stay because that was where the world had pegged me.  The box was my only world.  But now I know that there’s more.  And I know that I deserve what more lies beyond the box.

I deserve to be happy.  To be with people.  To laugh with them loudly and without care.  To say what I think and not hold back for fear of being disliked.  I deserve these things because I cannot be boxed.  My being is too bright, my facets too many to be contained.  I am many things.  I am sister, daughter, friend, geek, introvert.  But those are not the only things that I am.  Maybe I do have at least a foot stuck in the weird box.  I may very well be a weirdo.  But even weirdos deserve to live.

And life happens outside the box.

I might miss you, box, but I promise that I won’t come back.  My soul needs freedom from your confines.  It needs to explore and find love and happiness.  I will take some of the things I’ve tacked to your walls.  I will carry them with me, not like they are something heavy, but like they are a souvenir from a trip taken long ago.  The memories will follow me.  They will thunk in my pocket like a coin and jangle against the me of now, reminding me that they exist.  But they won’t take hold of me again.  They will no longer be my prison.  They will just be a part of me.  A part of me that shrinks as I exit the box and expand and grow into the me I am meant to be.

In Defense of the Heroes of Olympus (Who Aren't Percy)

Note:  This blog is not about Harry Potter.  Sorry!  I just had a lot of Percy Jackson feels to write about!

So here’s the thing.  Everyone in the Heroes of Olympus fandom loves Percy Jackson.  I mean, he’s damn near close to being a perfect character.  I’d argue that most of Riordan’s characters are damn near perfect.  For some reason, the internet likes to slam the rest of the heroes of Olympus.  So I’m writing this in defense of them.  Because I think each and every one of them is super important and relevant.

Annabeth Chase

I feel like I don’t have to defend Annabeth because she’s pretty much universally loved (except when it comes to Perachel shippers), but I will anyway because I freaking love Annabeth.  She’s intelligent, methodical, and a total badass with a knife.  Percy and Annabeth are my OTP, but even if they weren’t a couple, I would still love Annabeth.  She’s a fighter in more than just the literal sense of the word.  She suffers emotional traumas and she deals with them magnificently.  What I love about Annabeth most is that she doesn’t just stoically power through her issues, she powers through them realistically.  She panics, she cries, she nearly falls victim to her insecurities.  She’s more than just a badass, brilliant kid.  She’s a sixteen year old girl with legitimate sixteen year old problems.  She cares about her boyfriend and she’s not afraid to show it.  Just because she’s a badass, that doesn’t mean she can’t have feelings.   But also, Annabeth doesn’t just exist in the story to be Percy’s girlfriend.  She’s a lot more than that.  She’s definitely the leader of the quest.  (Jason and Percy obviously think so anyway because they let her have the head chair at the table after a stupid manly man standoff).  It’s great to see a female character in that kind of leadership role when she’s outnumbered by dudes.  And she’s also extremely kind.  People trust her.  Even Frank, who hardly knows her, trusts her to help him figure out the Chinese handcuff situation.  She’s someone that people can count on.

Leo Valdez

Leo gets a lot of love on the internet, but I was pretty surprised to find that he also gets a lot of hate.  The arguments for why Leo is crappy are that he’s selfish, he’s mean to Frank, and he cares about machines more than real people.  I’m not really concerned about the selfish thing.  Teenagers are selfish.  It’s in their nature.  No teenager is actually as perfect as Percy Jackson.  I could go one about ALL the heroes of Olympus’s selfish tendencies, but I won’t because they’re not interesting to me.   

As for the Frank thing, well, I’ll admit, Leo crosses the line sometimes.  He pretty much calls Frank fat at one point and as a fellow fatty, I am not cool with that.  But the thing is that I understand why he’s mean to Frank.  He sees Frank as competition.  He feels inadequate compared to Frank because Frank is this massive hulking guy with a beautiful girlfriend.  He doesn’t realize how insecure Frank is.  

Moving on to the machine-loving issue.  First of all, I don’t think that he actually likes machines more than people.  That’s just not true.  What IS true is that he feels more comfortable with machines than with people.  The only thing Leo has going for him is his sense of humor.  He’s not attractive or strong really.  So he becomes insecure and ends up taking his humor a step too far because he doesn’t know how to interact with people.  In the end of The Mark of Athena, we see that Leo cares about his friends (even Frank) more than even the most precious machine as he gives up the Archimedes stuff to save them.  To be honest, I find Leo’s inability to relate to people endearing because I have the same problem.  Leo’s flaws, I think, are what make him such a great character.  He does stupid stuff, but it’s realistically the same stupid stuff that we are all guilty of.  Leo represents a huge number of people in our generation because he’s been disconnected from real human relationships because of technology.  He’s extremely flawed, but that’s why he’s extremely relevant (and in my opinion, extremely lovable).

Frank Zhang

At first, I was pretty surprised to find that Frank doesn’t have a huge internet following like Leo or Percy does.   But know I think I know why.  Percy and Leo are sassy.  Tumblr loves sassiness.  But if we’re telling the truth, Percy and Leo are borderline rude sometimes.  You know who’s never rude?  Frank Zhang.  He gets mad at Leo sometimes, but usually only when Leo’s provoking him.  Frank is sweet and peaceful and adorably clumsy.  He feels insecure about his powers.  He’s always belittling them.  And I feel like that’s what makes him so endearing.  He’s self-deprecating.  And I don’t mean to get all, “you don’t know you’re beautiful, that’s what makes you beautiful” on you guys, but really, Frank’s humility is a breath of Fresh air compared to the faux bravado of Jason, Percy, and Leo.  Everyone feels like Frank sometimes.  We’re needed and important, but we don’t always know that we’re needed and important.  It’s really a shame that he’s so neglected in the fandom because I think that’s exactly the kind of thing Frank would be afraid of.  He’d be afraid that he wasn’t good enough for anyone.  People put too much importance on confidence and fail to find the value in a good old slice of humble pie.  Frank deserves all the fans.  Because out of all the other male heroes in the prophecy of the seven, he’s by far the most humble.

Piper McLean 

Piper is the most underrated demigod in the prophecy of the seven.  People write her off because she’s not a combat fighter like Hazel or Annabeth.  But the thing is, I think Piper is the most important female character in this story, because Piper’s weapon is her voice.  Piper’s skill is that she can make herself heard.  She can get people to see her way, to listen to her.  She does the thing that all women of the real world should strive to do: stand up for themselves and assert their authority in a male dominated world.  Seriously, I cannot express how important Piper is.  She’s not much of a physical fighter, she spends a lot of time thinking about her boyfriend, and she’s constantly conscious of the way she looks.  THESE ARE NOT NEGATIVE QUALITIES IN A PERSON.  In fact, they are completely realistic qualities to a fifteen year old girl.  This is why Piper is important.  She shows us that you can be a hero without having to use your fists.  You can be a hero without killing or maiming.  You can be girly and still be awesome.  Beauty queens can be badasses.  You don’t have to be an Annabeth Chase or an Arya Stark or a Katniss Everdeen.  If you’re a Piper– if you can get people to listen to you, you’re still a force to be reckoned with.

Hazel Levesque

Hazel’s not my favorite, to be honest.  It surprises me that Piper gets more crap than she does.  It’s not that there’s anything particularly unlikable about Hazel, but I tend to find myself weighed down and depressed by her story.  I mean, she’s a reincarnated daughter of Pluto from the 1940s who experienced extreme prejudice because of her race, and was cursed to create precious jewels that kill people, which made her mother go out of business and be forced to move to Alaska.  Then her mother was possessed by Gaia which eventually led to the death of both mother and daughter and the awakening of Gaia which Hazel  herself feels personally responsible for.  THEN she’s brought back to life by her half-brother who always makes her feel inadequate because really he’s just using her to replace his dead full sister.  Like, SWEET JESUS.  Life doesn’t get much shittier than that, right?  So like, I think any internal pain Hazel expresses in her chapters is completely 100% valid.  I would complain until I died a second time if I were Hazel.  But like I said, I just think that’s too much pain for one character to bear.    

On the other hand, what makes Hazel a truly great character is that she DOES manage to survive all the pain she goes through and still have a relatively positive outlook on things.  She is seriously inspirational to young girls in bad situations and I really like that aspect of Hazel’s character.  Also, she does something that I think a lot of girls do.  She internalizes a lot of pain and wrongly accepts being at fault for the poor decisions of adults.  She feels like it’s her fault that Gaia is rising, but let’s be real, it’s her mom’s fault.  Her mom is a really weird kind of verbally abusive and Hazel deals with that with incredible strength.  Anyway, Hazel carries all that pain around, but she doesn’t complain one bit.  And that’s admirable.  She undoubtedly has the most horrific backstory of anyone, AND she complains about it less than anyone.

Jason Grace

Poor Jason.  Jason gets crapped on a lot.  Mostly because he’s not Percy.  Honestly, I’m sure no fan of the series actually likes Jason better than Percy.  But that’s mostly because we had a whole book series dedicated to Percy before Jason even existed!  We know Percy better, so obviously we’re going to like him more.  If there had been a book series detailing Jason’s adventures side-by-side with Percy’s, then who knows who we would love more?  

Anyway, enough with the Percy talk and onto why Jason is actually awesome.  Jason’s got the stoic hero thing going on…except not really.  He’s trying really hard to be the stoic hero because that’s who he learned to be at Camp Jupiter, but that’s not who he really is.  He’s really a goofball– the kind of goofball who scars himself with a stapler as a child and who can tolerate Leo and keep up with his witty banter.  I think Jason’s struggle to find a balance between his Roman and Greek characteristics is really interesting.  John Green once said something about the hero’s journey being about going from strength to weakness and I think that Jason is a perfect example of that.  Jason goes from being the biggest big shot there is, to being the guy who keeps passing out all the time in The Mark of Athena.  Jason learns a lesson that a lot of guys his age could stand to learn:  He isn’t the only person capable of great things.  And more importantly, your self-worth doesn’t rely on being the best.  Lot’s of people are capable of great things and sometimes you need to rely on those people.  You can’t be the hero every time.  Sometimes you need to check your ego and accept some help.   

End of an Era?

So last weekend I watched A Very Potter Senior Year and it was fantastic.   I loved AVPM and AVPS too or course, but this one was just really insightful in a way that neither of the others were.  (Starship is still my favorite Starkid show, but AVPSY was way more awesome than I expected it to be.)  Of course the show was sloppily put together at the last second and full of microphone problems and mistakes, but it was still perfect somehow.  It shed some light on a lot of things that I’ve been mulling over for a while now.  I want to talk about those things, but FIRST I need to talk about the one scene I had a serious problem with in AVPSY, just so I can rant and get it out of my system.

There was that one terrible scene.  Like, it was just so bad.  There’s always that one terrible scene in a Starkid show that you just wish they’d have thought about for half a second before sticking it in there and grossing out everyone.  And usually it has to do with bathroom humor.  In A Very Potter Sequel there were the never ending Draco diaper jokes.  …And then AVPSY took this to another level of gross in a scene in which Voldemort has change his own grandfather’s underwear.  Ughhh…Starkid, you do so many things right but then you ALWAYS have to do something so wrong!

Anyway, now that I’ve expressed my irritation about that, I can move on to what I really loved about the show. Aside from the awkward and uncomfortable and WHATTHEHELLISGOINGON Voldemort scene, I pretty much loved the whole thing from start to finish.  I especially loved all the Gilderoy Lockhart jokes because I LOVE Gilderoy Lockhart.  And naturally, I loved all the books that he claimed to have “written” in the show.  I also kind of loved that one of those books was Percy Jackson, but then I had this really strange reaction to that moment that made me really think about my relationship with these books.  That little jab at Percy Jackson– that bugged me a bit.  It wasn’t even a real jab!  It was a hilarious joke!  Hermione just said that Lockhart wrote a bunch of young adult novels.  She listed a bunch of them, Twilight, The Hunger Games then at the end she tacked on PJ&O saying, “And Percy Jackson– whatever he did.”  On the outside I was all like LOLSQUEEPERCYJACKSONANDHARRYPOTTERCROSSOVER.  But man, was I inwardly defensive about that comment.  Inside I was all like, “BITCH, PERCY DEFEATED THE EVIL TITAN LORD KRONOS AND WAS SO AWESOME THAT HE WAS ASKED TO BE A GOD! THAT’S WHAT HE DID!”  And then immediately after than inward outburst I felt self-conscious.  Why was I giving my beloved Hermione Granger a mental smackdown?  Why was I a little bit irritated with my beloved Starkid?  Had my allegiance changed? 

I’ve been so obsessed with Percy Jackson and the Heroes of Olympus lately that I haven’t read Harry Potter in months.  I think I might think more about Percy now than I do about Harry.  And although I was worried that I might be betraying my true self or something ridiculous like that, I certainly wasn’t thinking that by the end of AVPSY.

When I love something I love it with my entire being.  I love it so hard that I feel like I have to stand on the roof and shout my love so the whole world knows about it.  It’s annoying, but it’s who I am.  I’ve been posting my undying love for Harry Potter on the internet for YEARS now and recently I’ve noticed something…the Harry Potter posts are fewer.

It’s not that I don’t love HP.  Of course I still do.  But I’ve realized that there are other things in this world to love besides Harry Potter.  And giving all your love to just one thing is bad.  Because it’s bad to let that one thing define you.  As good as Harry Potter is, it’s still bad to be just “that Harry Potter girl” in everyone’s eyes.

This isn’t exactly a recent epiphany.  It’s kind of been ongoing for the past six or seven months.  But after watching A Very Potter Senior Year this weekend, I know now that there’s nothing wrong with the way I’m feeling.  That it’s natural for me to move on.

 Voldemort has this great monologue in AVSY where he expresses exactly this:

“You know Harry Potter he opened me once, he taught me something. He taught me that it’s all right, to let go of things that hurt us. He taught me to open my heart up to what’s new. Harry Potter gave me a new family; he taught me how to love. And I guess that’s kind of what Harry Potter is all about. But you know, there comes a time, when you have to move on Quirrell, a time when we have to let even Harry Potter go. And that’s okay.”

Yes.  This.  This sums up everything.  Harry Potter has been one of the most important things in my life thus far.  Nothing can ever change what Harry Potter was to me, what it did for me.  But we do have to let go of things we love in order to make room for new things, things that can be just as good.  Things like Percy Jackson, The Hunger Games, and uh…maybe even being a grown up?  Maybe even pursuing your own destiny instead of marveling at the destiny of a fictional person? 

Does this mean that I’m going to stop loving HP?  Hell no.  I still love Harry Potter and I still intend to blog about him every once in a while.  But Harry Potter isn’t the only thing I love.  I also love One Direction and Game of Thrones and Percy Jackson and Nerdfighteria and all other sorts of fandoms.  And more importantly, I love people.  Real people.  Sometimes I’m not so good at expressing my love for people the way I express my love for fandoms.  I’m a bit like my boy (and second favorite hero of Olympus) Leo Valdez in the way that I’m not so great with organic life forms.  But also like Leo Valdez, at the end of the day, I know that people are still the most important parts of life even if they’re not the easiest to deal with.

AVPSY really stressed the fact that everything ends.  They even had a song called “Everything Ends.”  And to be honest, that song could not have been any more relevant to me at this time in my life.  Everything I’ve ever known is ending quickly for me.  School as I knew it is ending finally.  Childhood is ending.  And it’s all terrifying.  It always feels like whenever I get comfortable somewhere, whenever I finally feel like I know how I fit into some place– that’s when I have to leave.  I’ve made so many wonderful friends this year in my Russian classes and I love my roommate so gosh darn much.  I’m terrified that moving on and leaving college means that I have to leave my friends forever too.

But I know I’m not leaving them forever just the same way that I’m not leaving Harry Potter forever.  Relationships are the one thing in life that never truly need to end.  Even when people fall out of touch or don’t get to see each other that often– they’re still forever changed by the experiences they had in those relationships and they’ll carry that with them forever.  I just have to remember that though new things might come into my life, that doesn’t mean the old things are any less important than they were to me before.  My relationship with Harry Potter, just like my relationships with the people I know from school, will forever be an important aspect of what shaped my life.  

Loves, Past Loves, and How They Overlap

Hello world, it's been a while.

I know, I know.  I haven't written a blog post in over two months.  I have lots of excuses for that, but rather than wasting any time telling you what they are, I'm just going to get into a rant about my feelings.  Because, well, let's be honest, that's what I do best.

Over the past few weeks I have been having serious Lord of the Rings nostalgia.  The Hobbit movie came out last week and I've already seen it twice.  If you knew me in middle school, this won't surprise you.  Because in the middle of middle school, Middle Earth was my home.

Those who have only known me since college might find this surprising because of my love of Harry Potter.  I think a lot of people believe that if you like Harry Potter you can't like Lord of the Rings and vice versa.  They expect you to pick sides.  But I love them both, and believe it or not I love them both equally.

I cannot deny that Harry Potter has shaped my life in a way that nothing else ever will.  As Harry grew older, so did I and because of that nothing will ever truly match the kind of love I have for the series.  But when I was a seventh grader, my golden three were Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, not Harry, Ron, and Hermione.  Middle school was hard.  I mean, I know it's hard for everyone, but when you're an introvert that intensely loves fantasy fiction...well...you tend to be the girl who gets asked out as a joke.  So in middle school it really wasn't safe to actively love Harry Potter the way I do now.

In middle school everything you loved as a child is suddenly labeled as stupid.  It's that awkward period in everyone's life when they desperately want to be adults, but end up becoming even more immature in their attempts to seem older.  I think that's why I fell in love with Lord of the Rings.  It seemed like the sophisticated version of Harry Potter, so it was safe for me to love openly.  A lot of people probably still think that LOTR is the sophisticated version of HP and while I understand that some people will simply like Lord of the Rings better, I also believe that a lot of those people are still stuck in that middle school "I-am-trying-really-hard-to-impress-people-with-my-cultured-and-sophisticated-interests" stage.  Now of course I find it pretty funny that I ever believed that because though both works of fiction are undoubtedly similar, it is only because they share the same genre.  Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are not trying to accomplish the same things and therefore should not really be compared.

That being said, I absolutely adore both series.  Even though my love for Lord of the Rings may have spawned out of desperation to seem cooler than I was (and let's face it, an unhealthy obsession with Orlando Bloom) I still believe that Lord of the Rings is brilliant.  I think the books are written uniquely and brilliantly, I think the intricate details of language, culture, and history of all the characters is brilliant, and I think the movies are the most brilliantly perfect movies ever to be made....That's right, if it wasn't clear already, I think the LOTR movies are about a thousand times better than the HP movies.

I don't think this is interesting to anybody else, but I find it sort of fascinating that my obsession for Harry Potter came after my obsession for LOTR.  I mean, I've always loved HP, but my outward passion for it only became more pronounced close to the end of my high school career, when I finally felt it was safe again to openly be myself.  A lot of me wonders if this is simply because as people grow older, they yearn more and more for their childhood.  Am I just trying to hold onto childhood as long as I possibly can?  Is that why my loves have become Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and One Direction instead of Lord of the Rings?  Maybe a little bit.  But I'd like to think it's just because I'm becoming more accepting of all kinds of entertainment and all different sides of myself.  I'm not in middle school anymore and I've realized there's nothing to be gained from crapping on any kind of entertainment.  All that does is make you seem pretentious and hurt the feelings of the people who DO like the thing you're crapping on.

Anyway, although Harry Potter is more in my life now than Lord of the Rings, I know that LOTR is never going to  leave my life completely.  I'm glad that The Hobbit came out so I could remember that.  If you haven't seen The Hobbit...GO DO IT NOW!  It's so good.  I had really low expectations for it since I didn't think they would be able to transform one 300 page book into three movies, but I thought all the stuff they added from the appendices was really entertaining.  And somehow they did a really great job giving the movie the epic feeling of the LOTR movies while at the same time capturing the silly, whimsical feeling of the book version of The Hobbit.

I seriously can't wait until part two comes out on December 13th next year.  It's my sisters' birthday, so I'm pretty sure I know how we'll be celebrating. :)

The Whole Point

Hey, world.  Let’s talk about how The Casual Vacancy destroyed my otherwise lovely day.

I am TERRIFIED to read this book.  I was terrified about its very existence back when J.K. Rowling announced that she was going to write another book.  I was scared because I was worried that the book would undermine the beauty of the Harry Potter series because there was no way it could ever be as good.  Now I know that my fears were completely valid.  

I have not yet read The Casual Vacancy as it has only been out for a day, but I have already read some reviews that make me want to cry.  I knew that The Casual Vacancy was going to be a book for adults.  But I had no idea that it was going to be a book involving rape, drugs, and suicide.  I’m not particularly pleased that the most influential person in my childhood is choosing to do a book like this, but it is not my place to tell J.K. Rowling what she can and can’t write.  Besides, I have learned long ago that just because I love a book that does not mean that I have to love the author’s real life choices.  Less Than Zero and Ender’s Game are two of my favorite books.  And because they are so fantastic as stand alone pieces of literature, I have forced myself to accept and ignore the fact that Bret Easton Ellis and Orson Scott Card are ignorant jerks.  I love Harry Potter, but that doesn’t mean that I have to love J.K. Rowling or any of her other books.

Anyway, what’s worse than the reviews of The Casual Vacancy are the people who comment on these things because predictably, just like I thought they would, they start bashing Harry Potter.  I just read the New York Times review and found the biggest onslaught of hatred for Harry Potter.   So many people insisted that the books were silly and meaningless and poorly written.  These people have forgotten that Harry Potter was originally a series written for young children.

Many people are upset because the reviewer compared Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings.  As both a Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings fan, I found the reactions to this statement to be particularly disheartening.  I know that the world is going to insist that I’m only saying this because I’m a petty child with undeveloped intelligence and no concept of what makes good literature, but I don’t care, I’m going to say it:  I think that Harry Potter is definitely the equal of Lord of the Rings in every way as far as literary merit goes. But that hardly matters.  Because “literary merit” is the biggest heap of bullshit ever to stain the world of entertainment and literature.

Now, before you decide to discount everything I say, I’ll have you know that I am an English major.  My life revolves around reading the classics.  I enjoy the classics.  The Picture of Dorian Gray, Frankenstein, Brave New World, Dubliners– I think they’re all brilliant.  But I also think that Harry Potter is brilliant.  For different reasons.  Anyway, I’m about to go into the most long-winded rant about why Harry Potter is just as good as all of the classics.  But I’m going to get really crazy here and say that Harry Potter isn’t alone in this.  All literature is just as good.  ALL of it.  That’s right.  I’m talking Twilight, Eat, Pray, Love, The Hunger Games, Fifty Shades of Grey.  I went there.  And I stand by it.  In order to keep this shorter than a Harry Potter novel though, I will use only Twilight, Harry Potter, and Eat, Pray, Love as examples.

Most who know me, or know of me, immediately think of me as “that Harry Potter girl.”  I don’t really have a problem with this.  As far as identifying features go I’d say this one is rather complimentary– better than being “that guy with the creepy mustache” or “that girl who wears too much eyeliner” anyway.  I guess I bring it upon myself, I must subconsciously want people to think of me this way.  Otherwise I wouldn’t proudly saunter around campus with my Quidditch schoolbag, Undesirable Number One t-shirt, and Gryffindor lanyard, I wouldn’t deck out my room with a plethora of posters consisting of mostly Neville, the trio and many of the movie titles, and I definitely wouldn’t stand outside of classrooms reading Harry, A History or Looking for God in Harry Potter for the third time.  I’m a big fan of outwardly expressing my love for these books, because then people notice and comment and for a moment or two we are connected by something we both passionately love.  And that, ultimately, is what I believe the purpose of literature is:  to connect all of humanity, celebrate in our unity and discover ourselves to have a better understanding of life.  That’s always been my problem with other English majors.  A lot of us seem to think we’re too good for books that are accessible, because we as English majors have a rather pretentious view that our heightened knowledge of literature elevates us above the average reader and therefore we should have higher standards in a book’s “literary merit”.  This is not how it is supposed to be.  We’re supposed to be trying to understand all of humanity, not the only the privileged few.  In many ways, Harry Potter, Twilight, and Eat, Pray, Love have succeeded in a way that complex and acclaimed novels have not.  Because they have connected to a greater number of people, they have increased the world’s shared experiences and connected people so deeply in a way that they could not otherwise be connected.  The lessons learned from these best-sellers, whether they be cheesy or not, have meant something powerful to a much larger number of people, and that seems like the whole point to me, that people would find a shared feeling of passion and understanding from reading a book and feel a strong sense of kinship because of it.

 On that note, if you would try to deny the effect these kinds of books have had on society, you would be a complete idiot.  Some people think it is despicable that you can take the Eat, Pray, Love tour of Italy.  So here’s my question.  Why?  Here it is once again, the proof that this bestseller is bringing people together in a way that they otherwise would not have been able to experience– it’s bringing people together out of love and passion for something.  What about that seems wrong?  In Forks, Washington on September 13th they now celebrate Twilight day as it is the setting of Stephanie Meyer’s novel.  Maybe to the non-Twilight fans of Forks, this seems irritating, but to someone on the outside, someone who could care less about the birthplace of Bella Swan, I think it’s a fantastic idea.  People being united by a common love always seems like a good idea to me.  And then of course there’s the fandom of Harry Potter.  Now, this I know the most about so I can tell you for sure that the effect this fandom and community has had on my life is astounding.  I'm sure you've heard this before, but I'll say it because it's true: Harry Potter is more than a book or movie series, it’s one of the most widely recognized and loved communities in the world.  Harry Potter has brought together people in ways that nothing else I’ve ever seen has.  How many books series do you know that have their own musical genre?  Maybe you’ve never heard of Wizard Rock, but believe it or not there are over 700 Wrock bands just in the US and millions upon millions have been connected through their concerts.  Did you know that Wizard Rock sky-rocketed John and Hank Green into YouTube superstardom?  Did you know that this resulted in a community of watchers called “Nerdfighters” who band together to decrease what they call “worldsuck” donating to charities all because they have realized their shared love of Harry?  Did you know that there is a real life Dumbledore’s Army called The Harry Potter Alliance that fights for equality and hosts charity events all over the country in the spirit of the books?  I don’t know about you, but to me, all these things –music, charity, friendship– all because of a book, that seems like a real world miracle to me.  This is all just proof of how much these accessible books have deepened our understandings of one another, connecting us all through shared experiences that go even beyond just reading the novels.  This is the whole point, people– this is the point of literature epitomized, it’s supposed to bring us together, and that it what these novels do.

I can understand people not liking Harry Potter because they’re not into fantasy.  I can understand people not liking Twilight because they’re not into romance.  I can understand people not liking Eat, Pray, Love because they don’t sympathize with or understand Gilbert’s plight.  What I cannot understand, is how people can condemn these books because they are happy.  Are we that bitter, people?  Why does everything have to be about drugs or suicide or rape?  Those things are important, tragic books are important, but so are books that inspire hope.  And I do not think it is foolish to endorse hope.  I do not think it is foolish to say that a happy ending is not cliché.  A happy ending is what we all secretly want for ourselves, right?  So why can’t be accept them in literature?  Why does a happy ending make a book less adequate?  People seem to forget that a number of Shakespeare’s comedies end in happy marriages and that nearly every single Jane Austen book ends the same way.  These are perhaps the most celebrated artists of all time.  And we accept these endings from them, so why can’t we accept it from today’s literature?  Why do we cringe when Harry and Ginny and Ron and Hermione and Bella and Edward and Elizabeth and whoever her husband is get together in the end?  We’ve extolled it in the past.  We still praise it actually.  So why is it suddenly stupid for a story to end this way?  It doesn’t make sense.  You would think that after all the grim drudgery of everyday life that we would want to see a happy ending.  Being optimistic isn’t a sin, people.  One of my favorite author’s, John Green once commented “…what I really do like about Twilight…it’s fun, it distracts me from the pain and brokenness of the world and it argues that true love will triumph in the end, which may or may not be true, but if it’s a lie, it’s the most beautiful lie we have.”  In the end, all novels are fiction (yes I am aware that Eat, Pray Love does not apply to this point, but bear with me), they’re all lies.  So why is it so wrong for them to be beautiful lies every once in a while?  I, for one, understand why people would want to be distracted from “the pain and brokenness of the world” and I am not going to mock them for it.  The world can suck sometimes and guess what?  Stuff like Twilight and Harry Potter makes it better.  Because it brings some happiness to people’s miserable lives.  And again, I fail to see how this is a bad thing in any way, shape, or form.

I also refuse to believe that these books make people stupid.  There is something to be gained from any book.  If you do not learn anything from reading a book, you are not reading it right.  If you look closely enough, there is always something significant lying within the text that may not be noticeable upon the surface.  As someone who has read the entire Harry Potter series six going on seven times, I can tell you that if you read closely there is symbolism and deeper meaning that goes far beyond just the simple pleasure of reading a children’s story.  There is much more there than wizards and house elves, and plot twists.  I’m not as much of an expert on Twilight and whether or not it contains something beyond sparkling vampires (I once read that the entire thing is a Mormon allegory but who knows), but if the entire point of the series is to relish in the fact that true love with conquer all, then I fail to see why this is an insufficient message for a book to have.  The same goes for Eat, Pray, Love.  It gives people hope.  Call that cliché if you want, but with that one word, “hope,” President Obama had a campaign that eventually won him the election.  It’s a powerful thing for sure.

So here’s my last argument.  Are these books indulgent?  Hell.  Yes.  ALL LITERATURE IS INDULGENT.  You are in denial if you think otherwise.  Anyone who has ever written anything is indulging in a passion.  Also, we as readers are indulging in our passions every time we pick up a book.  Entertainment is always indulgent.  Read one poem, watch one movie, see one play and tell me how it is not indulgent.  Oscar Wilde once said that “All art is quite useless.” So in his eyes, all art (having no purpose at all) was on an equal playing field.  I would like to alter this idea slightly and say that all art is quite indulgent.  But just because it is indulgent that doesn’t make it a bad thing.  I know I sound like a broken record but I’ll say it again since this is my conclusion:  the point of literature is to share in an experience that can help us to better understand each other– and indulging in our passions this way is how we do it…so remind me…what about this is a bad thing?

Abby Disagrees with Hank Green

All right, it’s happened.

Hank Green, I have a bone to pick with you.

Now, normally, I agree with absolutely everything that Hank Green says.   He’s one of my biggest idols.  I love that he loves nerdy things that I love and I love how intelligently and complexly he views the world.  But I do not love his new song.

On Friday Hank played his annual song about Harry Potter.  Usually, I love his Harry Potter songs, but I disliked this one for many reasons:

Firstly, it seems to me that a song that overall seems to insult the Harry Potter universe is not at all a good tribute to the fandom that brought you internet fame.  The message of Harry Potter is a message of love, and I feel like the point J.K. Rowling was trying to make throughout the whole series was that even though the world might be full of injustice like slavery or corruption and general unfairness, in the end, love is what gets us through it all. 

Secondly, his points are invalid.

I’m the first person to point out inaccuracies in the Harry Potter universe, but everything Hank brought up just doesn’t make much sense to me.  So I’m going to take some of the quotes from the song and point out what about them seems wrong to me.  Excuse me if I don’t get the lyrics exactly right, I had to awkwardly pause the video to type them out myself because I couldn’t find them anywhere online yet.

“You make it seem like your world is so pristine.”

Read ONE Harry Potter book and tell me that the main characters don’t freely admit how corrupt and shitty parts of the world are.  For instance see ALL of book five.  I don’t know about you, but the Wizarding world has NEVER seemed pristine to me.  It probably only seems pristine to you because fans have been putting it up on a pedestal and therefore failing to imagine the place and the people who inhabit it complexly.

“Well you don’t seem to have much industry.  Wizards work at a school or at the ministry.”

False.  The reason it seems like everyone works at these two places are because these are the two places where our main characters are generally located.  Wizards seem to have pretty similar occupations to Muggles.  They can work at a hospital (healers), they can work at a shop or pub (think Diagon Alley, people), they can work as professional sportsmen (Quidditch players) or they can work as bank tellers…therefore discounting Hank’s next claim:

“And by letting Goblins house your currency, you’re letting them control your whole economy.”

Gringotts may be owned by Goblins, but it’s not like Goblins are the only beings involved at the bank.  Not only Goblins work there.  Bill Weasley works at Gringotts, remember?  So does Fleur Delacour. 

“I don’t understand how any business gets done when a wand only costs seven galleons.”

According to the Harry Potter Wiki page,

“Galleon or Gold-Galleon is the most valued coin of the wizarding currency. One Galleon is equal to 17 Sickles or 493 Knuts. Galleons are made of gold.

In the late 20th century, the Galleon was also equivalent to £4.97 GBP, or $10.17 USD”

Now, I don’t know how legit that is…but if it IS legit then seven galleons is about SEVENTY DOLLARS!  Which is kind of a lot of money, Hank.  I mean, come on.  You like money a lot.  So I know you know that’s a lot of money to spend on one thing.

If that doesn’t convince you, let us remember what exists in the Weasley’s vault as far as money goes.  In Harry and Ron’s second year of school when they visit the Weasley’s vault there is only a little pile of sickles and ONE galleon.  So galleons are a pretty big sum of money.  Think about it!

 “They say you can put a stopper in death and I’m wondering why you haven’t shared that yet.”

How about because the wizards had to go into hiding because they were persecuted?  I’m pretty sure this has been explained several times…  The wizards aren't keeping their knowledge secret because they’re jerks, they’re keeping their knowledge secret because they don’t want to be put on trial and killed.  Seems pretty reasonable to me.  If you need more convincing, check out the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy.  

“Cuz when my friends and family die and the wizards aren’t helping then I wonder why.”

In the words of Albus Dumbledore, "To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure." THE WHOLE POINT OF HARRY POTTER IS THAT DEATH IS WHAT MAKES LIFE MEANINGFUL!  GAAAAAAAAAH!

“You’ve got known racists playing politics.”

Yes.  And that’s completely unique to the HP universe…oh wait.  No it’s not.  That happens in real life.

“You’ve got slaves making your food.”

Well…yeah.  That is a problem that probably should have been solved since she introduced it.  But hey, no one cries about the fact that George Effing R.R. Martin won’t solve the problems he creates.

“I think I’d rather deal with the problems we have here.”

Oh, you mean like the aforementioned racists playing politics and a so called shitty economy?  Yeah, because we don't have those problems here at all...

Okay, I should probably wrap this up and quit ranting.  I love Hank.  He's one of my favorite people in the entire universe.  But I just don't really agree with this particular video of his.  What do you think?

The Flaw of Fred and George

I am very fortunate to have two amazing people in my life.  They are the most beautiful, talented, understanding, intelligent, and enthusiastic individuals that I have ever met.  They are wonderful.  They are my sisters.  And they are identical twins.

Yes, my little sisters, Molly and Megan, share all of those wonderful personality traits.  In so many ways they are like Fred and George:  people love them for their sense of humor, their unique approach to problem solving, and their dedication to those they care about.  But here is where the comparison ends.  Because Molly and Megan are more than just charming and funny twins– they are individuals.

This has always been the problem with Fred and George.  They are interchangeable.  While they are universally loved, they are not fully developed, separate characters.  Don’t get me wrong, I love Fred and George, but it really bothers me that they are so one dimensional.  It’s like their entire character is that they are twins and that they are funny.  And yes, I said “character” instead of “characters” on purpose because they are essentially the same character.  They often complete each other’s sentences– something that people love about twins and expect from twins for some reason.  I think it’s cute too when they say things at the same time, but it also contributes to the idiotic stereotype that twins “share brainwaves” and are actually “the same person.”

Lots of people will tell you that they have a favorite Weasley twin, but I’m sure that none of them can give you a valid reason.  Usually, it’s Fred and their reasoning behind it is because he’s dead.  That’s just stupid to me.  And whenever I point out that it’s stupid, people are always like, “Oh no, I’ve just always liked Fred more…he talks more…there’s something about him…”  And of course, none of that makes any sense.  Fred and George have an equal amount of lines.  Usually after one speaks the other chimes in right afterwards.  J.K. Rowling obviously did this on purpose because she wanted them to be equally loved…which is annoying.  The Fred Weasley page on the Harry Potter wiki claims, “Fred Weasley was the more outgoing, daring, and sarcastic of the twins” and provides a few examples, but they are such slight differences that I hardly think they are significant.  It seems like the person (or people) who wrote this page probably just didn't want it to seem like they were the same character because they’re one of those really defensive HP fans who freaks out whenever someone tries to have a debate about something and bursts out into a “LEAVE J.K. ALONE!” kind of rant.

Another annoying thing about Fred’s death is that it seems to me that she only killed Fred because he had a twin.  Because she knew there would still be one left over once he had died– so that character, in a way, would still live on.  She even goes so far as to say that George eventually marries Angelina Johnson…with whom FRED attended the Yule Ball.  THAT is maddeningly infuriating to me and actually makes me a little sick.  Rowling probably thought it was cute when she decided that, but I think it’s a cruel and miserable situation for both George and Angelina.  Considering they attended the Yule Ball together, I assume that Fred and Angelina had a somewhat romantic relationship.  And if that was indeed the case, then it is extremely inappropriate for Angelina to even think about dating George.  Like, did she think, “Oh well, Fred is gone, but at least I still have George as a backup!  Good replacement since they’re the same exact person.”? That’s not okay at all.  Even if they did both sincerely love each other, I think there would still be doubt in George’s mind all the time, wondering if she was only with him to stay close to Fred.  So while I’m mad at J.K. Rowling for killing Fred, I’m angrier at her for what she did to George.  I think she saw Fred as the safest Weasley to kill.  If you think of it from George’s perspective, losing Fred is the worst possible thing that could happen to him.  But George isn’t our main character, he isn’t even our main Weasley character, so we don’t get that kind of insight into the true horror that comes with Fred’s death.  Instead there’s just this awful, guilty acknowledgement that I’m sure every single person thought while they were reading, “Well, at least we still have George…”

And that shouldn’t be what we think when a character dies!  We should be thinking how awful it is because that character had so many unique qualities that contributed so much to the lives of the characters around them.  When Dobby died, we were devastated because Dobby had always tried to save Harry in his own eccentric way, wearing tea cozies and mismatching socks.  When Dumbledore died, we were devastated because he was the greatest sorcerer of the age and probably the most prominent father figure to Harry.  To me, the most upsetting thing about Fred’s death isn’t that we lost such a unique and amazing character, (because honestly he still existed in George) but rather that George lost his twin brother, a bond and closeness that most of us will never fully understand or experience.

 I understand why Fred and George are presented the way they are.  That image of twins is an image that most people find alluring.  It’s an image they can understand.  That’s okay, I guess, because Harry Potter isn’t a story about the hardships of being a twin and the importance of recognizing the differences between twins.  But it still bothers me because I’ve seen my sisters get grouped together every single day of their lives; being called the wrong names by their friends, having their achievements or failures combined for no reason at all.  Because I’ve witnessed this first hand and seen how much it bothers my sisters, I hated every single time someone messed up Fred and George in the books.  And I hated even more that they never resented it.  They were just okay with being the same person.

J.K. Rowling tries to makes up for Fred and George’s similarities in her characterization of Parvati and Padma Patil.  In fact, I think that Padma’s whole existence in the books might be so that J.K. Rowling could feel okay about the way she portrayed Fred and George.  This way, every time someone brings up this argument she can be like, “Oh no, I completely understand how twins can be different.  See how I put Parvati and Padma in separate Houses?”  That is kind of a good argument too…except that we never really see enough of Padma to know that she really is any different than Parvati.  They’re in different Houses, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t just as similar as Fred and George in personality.  It’s possible that Padma is just as silly and gossip obsessed as Parvati.  Trust me, I know plenty of clever people who love to gossip…how do you think they get all of their information?  My roommate and I are almost exactly alike in personality, but Pottermore sorted me into Slytherin and her into Gryffindor.  I probably sound like a broken record by now, but Houses are stupid.  They don’t define who you are or really even what your values are, which is annoying because that is their whole purpose and they fail at it.  Hermione is clever, but she’s in Gryffindor, not Ravenclaw.  So putting Parvati and Padma in Gryffindor and Ravenclaw respectively proves nothing about them as twins.

I’m starting to rant now, but I can’t stress my irritation with this enough.  Twins are separate human beings and it really just frustrates me how uncannily similar Fred and George are.  When I read the Harry Potter wiki pages about them, I really want to believe that the few examples they give of their differences in personality are relevant…but I just don’t think they are.  They’re so very subtle that I’m not sure I really buy it.  Anyway, what do you think?  Do Fred and George come off as the same to you?  Do they differ in personality just enough that you think it’s believable?  Give me some examples!  Preferably not the ones from the Fred and George wiki pages…I’ve seen those and I’m not convinced.